Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net

There was a moment of silence. "You gonna eat that, or what?" Sticky said at last. Laura realized that she had picked up the plastic fork. She'd been bending it in her fingers, over and over, as if it were glued to her hand.

She set it down. "What's a `Bulgarian pebble,' Sticky?"

" 'Pellet,' " Sticky said. "Old Bulgarian KGB use 'em long ago. Tiny lickle piece of steel, holes drilled in, and sealed with wax. Stick it in a man, wax melts from his body heat, poison inside, ricin mostly, good strong venom... . Not what we use. "

"What?" Laura said.

"Carboline. Wait." He left the table, opened a kitchen cabinet, and pulled out a sealed bubble pack. Inside it was a flat black plastic cartridge. "Here."

She looked it over. "What's this? A printer ribbon?"

"We wire 'em up to the taxis," Sticky said. "Has a spring gun inside, twenty, thirty pellets of carboline. When the taxi spots a man in the street, sometimes the gun fires. An un- manned taxi is easy to steal and rig. The taxis outside that bank were full of these toys. Carboline is a brain drug, it makes terror. Terror in his blood, slow, steady leak, to last for days and days! Why work to terrorize some fool when you can just terrorize him, simple and sweet?"

Sticky laughed. He was beginning to talk a little faster now. "That Yankee Jap in the line ahead of you, he's gonna toss, and turn, and sweat, and dream bad dreams. I could have killed him, just as easy, with venom. He could be dead right now, but why kill a flesh, when I can touch a soul? For everyone around him now, he'll talk dread and fear, dread and fear, just like burning meat stinks."

"You shouldn't tell me this," Laura said.

"Because you have to go tell the government, don't you?"

Sticky sneered. "You do that for me, go ahead! There are twelve thousand taxis in Singapore, and after you tell it, they have to search every damn one! Too much work to wreck their transport system, when we can get they own cops to do it for us! Don't forget to say this too: we rig their magnet trains. And we got plenty more such lickle guns left."

She set it down on the table. Carefully. As if it were made from spun glass.

The words began to tumble from him. "By now they know that sticky gum their boss man, Kim, touched." He pointed.

"You see those paint cans?" He laughed. "Evening gloves comin' back to fashion in Singapore! Raincoats and surgery masks, those are smart, too!"

"That's enough!"

"You don't want to hear about the paper-clip mines?"

Sticky demanded. "How cheap they are, to blow a fockin'

leg off at the knee!" He slammed his fist into the table.

"Don't you cry at me!"

"I'm not crying!"

"What's that on you face then?" He lurched to his feet, kicking back his chair. "Tell me you cry when they haul me out of here dead!"

"Don't!"

"I'm the devil in a cathedral! Stained glass everywhere, but me with lightning under every fingertip! I'm Steppin'

Razor, Voice of Destruction, they're gonna bust every black man in this town lookin' for us and they fockin' multiracial social justice, I mean chaos!" He was shrieking at her. "Not a stone on a stone! Not a board standing, not a mirror glass that don't cut to the bone!" He danced across the room, flailing his arms, kicking trash underfoot. "Jah fire! Thunder!

I can do it, girl! It's easy! So easy ..."

"No! Nobody has to die!"

"It's great! And grand! A great adventure! It's glorious! To - have the mighty power in you, and let it run, that's a war- rior's life! That's what I have, right now, right here, worth everything, anything!"

"No, it's not!" she screamed at him. "It's craziness!

Nothing's easy, you've got to think it through-"

He vanished before her eyes. It was quick, and simple. He gave a sort of sideways jump and wriggle first, as if he'd greased himself to slide through a hole in reality. Gone.

She rose from her chair, legs still a little weak, a pain behind her knees. She looked around herself carefully. Si- lence, the sound of dust settling, the damp warm smell of garbage. She was alone.

"Sticky?" she said. The words fell on emptiness. "Come back, talk to me."

A rush of human presence. Behind her, at her back. She turned, and there he stood. "You a silly girl," he said,

"somebody's mother." He snapped his fingers under her nose.

She tried to shove him away. He seized her neck with whiplash speed. "Go on," he crooned, "just breathe."

A monsoon breeze whipped at her hair. Laura looked over the city from the roof of the Rizome godown.

The Net was a broken spiderweb. No phones at all. Televi- sion shut down, except for a single, emergency government channel. Laura felt the dead electric silence in her bones.

The dozen Rizome associates were all on the roof, mo- rosely spooning up breakfasts of seaweed and kashi. Laura rubbed her bare, phoneless wrist, nervously. Below her, three stories down by the loading docks, a gang of Anti-Labourites practiced their morning Tai Chi Chuan. Soft, languorous, hypnotic movements. No one led them, but they moved in unison.

They had barricaded the streets, their bamboo rickshaws laden with stolen sacks of cement and rubber and coffee beans. They were defying the curfew, the government's sud- den and draconic declaration of martial law, which lay over

Singapore like a blanket of lead. The streets were the army's now. And the skies, too.... Tall monsoon clouds over the morning South China Sea, a glamorous tropic gleam like puffed gray silk. Against the clouds, the dragonfly cutouts of police helicopters.

At first, the Anti-Labourites had claimed, as before, that they were "observing for civil rights." But as more and more of them had gathered during the night of the fourteenth, the pretense had faded. They had broken into warehouses and offices, smashing windows, barricading doors. Now the reb- els were swarming through the Rizome godown, appropriat- ing anything they felt was useful... .

There were hundreds of them, up and down the waterfront, viper-eyed young radicals in blood-red headbands and wrinkled paper clothes, wearing disposable surgical masks to hide their identities from police video. Grouping on street corners, exchanging elaborate ritual handshakes. Some of them mut- tering into toy walkie-talkies.

They had gathered here deliberately. Some kind of contin- gency plan. The docklands of East Lagoon were their strong- hold, their natural turf.

The docks had been depressed for years, half abandoned from the global embargoes inflicted on Singapore. The pow- erful Longshoreman's Union had protested to the P.I.P. ruler- ship with increasing bitterness. Until the troublesome union had been simply and efficiently disemployed, as a deliberate act, by a government investment in industrial robots.

But with the embargoes, even the robots were idle much of the time. Which was why Rizome had been able to buy into the shipping business cheaply. It was hard for Singapore to turn down such a sucker bet: even knowing that Rizome's intentions were political, an industrial beachhead.

The P.I.P. 's attack on the union, like most of their actions, was smart and farsighted and ruthless. But none of it had worked out quite the way the Government had planned. The union hadn't broken, but bent, twisted, mutated, and spread.

Suddenly they had stopped demanding work at all, and started demanding permanent leisure.

Laura could see them down there now, in the streets. A

few were women, a few older men, but mostly classic young troublemakers. She'd read somewhere once that 90 percent of the world's havoc was committed by men between fifteen and twenty-five. They were branding the walls and streets with neat stenciled slogans. "PLAY FOR KEEPS! WORKERS OF THE

WORLD, RELAX!"

Razak's Rejects, their bellies full of cheap bacterial chow. For years they'd lived for next to nothing, dossing down in abandoned warehouses, drinking from public fountains. Politics filled their days, an elaborate ideology, as convoluted as a religion.